Victoria Hospital
Facilities Management
Building a Business Intelligence System
1 E
XECUTIVE
S
UMMARY
At the Victoria Hospital Facilities Management (FM) department, Global BI (GBI) was brought in to create a solution that would allow executives and project managers to access critical
information in real-time. The necessity to see good information cannot be understated because all decisions are based on good information at FM.
Within a few short months of the engagement, Global BI was able to create a Business
Intelligence (BI) solution that allows for users to interactively analyze data about projects and space in real-time.
The project was broken up into three phases: Data Foundation, Data Warehouse, and Business Intelligence. Each of the phases is described briefly below:
Data Foundation: During this phase, the universe of available data was analyzed. Most data is coming from Archibus (a project tracking ERP system). Besides determining what data is available, this phase was also used to determine the quality and completeness of the information.
Data Warehouse: During this phase, a data warehouse as built for FM. Because of the
warehouse, data is now centralized in one location for users to ask questions of various aspects of the business such as space management, projects, etc. The data warehouse also cleans the source data which allows users to trust the information a lot more. Since the data is
centralized, access to this data is very fast and allows speed-of-thought analysis.
Business Intelligence: This is phase that is constantly evolving. Currently, there are interactive spreadsheets online that allows user to slice-and-dice and drill through the data. For the non-power user, interactive reports and dashboards are available online as well. Global BI believes in a user-drive BI methodology so that we don’t create report factories. The users are FM are totally self-sufficient in driving their own conclusions while analyzing data in their own way. Next steps: The solution is an evolving solution. However, because of its design, it is very
2 B
UILDING A STRONG DATA FOUNDATION
The necessity to see good information cannot be understated because all decisions are based on good information at FM. For good business intelligence, good data is a must. Therefore, in any information-related project, one must take care of the data layer first.
At the time of engagement, project information lived in a network file system and in Archibus and was spread in multiple locations. It was impossible to collate all the information in one place in an easy fashion. While the Archibus system was being used to input some data, it was still far from usable.
Once Global BI got involved with the FM department, we started cleaning up the most important asset … data! Archibus has a lot of investment behind it so it was not easy to start from scratch and build the “right” system. So, with the help of expert support for Archibus, GBI was able to gather input from all key users and enhance the project management screens in Archibus. The current screens are extremely user-friendly and the mandate for 2014 is that all project information will only reside in Archibus and the legacy file system will no longer be used.
With the new screens, the project data is much easier to input and therefore the adoption is very high. Several (if not all) project managers were used to get feedback when creating these screens. As a result of this, the most important ingredient in the BI system (i.e. the data) is now being fed effectively into the Archibus repository.
While the improvements to Archibus improves the quality of future data, it does not address the bad data that is already in the system. As part of the data foundation phase, we spent a lot of time profiling the data and determining its quality. Through all these years of experience, we realize that “dirty” data exists in every organization. The art of creating an effective business intelligence solution requires the ability to manage dirty data while still providing accurate information.
3 B
UILDING A DATA WAREHOUSE
Making Archibus usable is simply the foundation step to building the overall BI System. Archibus represents the source data system and not the BI system. Therefore, it was very important to create a data warehouse that modeled the business of Facilities Management (FM).
Within a few weeks we were able to extract key data elements from Archibus and create a data warehouse for FM. The data warehouse is much more efficient than Archibus for reporting and analysis purposes. The data warehouse provides the following benefits to Facilities
Management:
1. Clean data: As data is moved from Archibus to the data warehouse, it is cleaned. Missing values are replaced and bad data is discarded. This allows the users of the data warehouse to look at high quality data and make effective decisions.
2. Centralized data: While the only source of data currently is Archibus, the data warehouse allows FM to ingest data from any source including other system, Excel spreadsheets, or the internet. This is not possible in Archibus without customization. 3. High-speed data: The data warehouse is modeled to perform at very high speeds. For
example, an entire summary of the 4,500+ projects in the system takes a couple of seconds. This allows users to “drill” through and analyze the data at the speed of thought.
4. Foundation for Business Intelligence: The data warehouse forms the foundation for advanced analytics and business intelligence reporting. Unlike before, all the BI
reporting tools now only need to point to the data warehouse to get all the information from a single source. The next section describes how business intelligence is making a large impact on the day-to-day decision making of the FM team.
5. Historical data: Another very powerful advantage of the data warehouse is that it allows for historical / trending analysis. Over time, there are patterns in project execution, space utilization, etc. These patterns can then be used to predict and alert
4 F
ROM
R
EPORTING TO
B
USINESS
I
NTELLIGENCE
Using Microsoft technology (see the Technology Footprint section), Global BI delivered an online business intelligence solution to Facilities Management that allows users to seamless drill through the data warehouse over the web. Users are able to do what-if analysis and filter large sets of data into manageable chunks. Questions that used to take days to answer are now answered in seconds. Currently the BI system can answer any question related to projects and space. More “modules” will be built as more types of data is stored in the warehouse.
Some example questions / analyses that are now possible through the FM BI system:
Project funding analysis.
Project timelines – on-time, delayed, etc.
Analysis by project size.
Analysis by VP, Division Head, Project Manager.
Analysis by project stage / milestones.
Dashboards that can provide a summary view of all projects.
… and so on.
